Kim Chan is the Founder and CEO of DocPro, one of the fastest growing next generation legal tech platforms in the world. DocPro provides quality and affordable legal documents to businesses and individuals around the world through cutting-edge technology. Our members can create / request / pool / share / comment on documents, with easy to use guidance through a few simple steps.
Kim is qualified in 5 common law jurisdictions and has over 20 years of legal experience in the legal industry, including experience in a leading international law firm and senior legal and compliance positions at major investment banks.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is DocPro all about?
DocPro is the leading online provider of automated documents to businesses and individuals. DocPro’s mission is to make legal documentation affordable and accessible to everyone. Currently, DocPro operates a legaltech platform (DocPro.com) by combining legal documentation services with cutting edge technology.
DocPro is known specifically for its document generation tool that helps users quickly and efficiently create automated documents and contracts. Users can choose from over 1,500 templates through DocPro’s advance search function, complete a questionnaire to customise the template, and a legal document is generated automatically. DocPro helps to simplify contracting and free up time and resources from documents generation, so that users can focus on strategic decisions to improve their businesses.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started DocPro?
I graduated law in the late 90s, when the internet was just taking off, and I have always believed in bringing law online. At that time, I have been offered a job at a top international law firm and it would be an enormous opportunity cost to give up a highly paid job as a lawyer to pursue something uncertain. At the end, I opted for the safer route – I worked for top law firms and major international banks, thinking that I will make enough money to start a LegalTech business in 10 years time. Then I got married and have kids, and my business plan has again been delayed. It took me 20 years to gain sufficient financial security to start DocPro.
Hopefully I am not too late in the game as LegalTech has not really taken off in any big way in the past 20 years. Unlike other sectors, there is no household name like Amazon, Airbnb or Uber that people will instinctively recognize when talking about LegalTech. LegalZoom is probably the most well-known of all but it is mainly U.S. based. Some of the reasons why the LegalTech sector is so behind are: (i) LegalTech startups are scares since they need to be founded by lawyers, who are not likely to give up their high paying jobs to do this; (ii) lawyers tend to be more conservative and believe LegalTech will undermine their fees; (iii) lawyers are generally not good at doing online business and marketing.
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
Contrary to popular belief, it is not easy to find good document templates online. Let’s say you are searching for a lease, you need to go through hundreds of ads and search results before you can find a suitable word template. What’s more, most of the documents online are under US law which may not be applicable in your jurisdiction. To make matter worse, you have downloaded a landlord friendly version which may put you at a disadvantage as a tenant.
DocPro’s mission is to “Democratise Documents” – we hope to make a difference by providing quality and affordable legal documents to businesses and individuals around the world through cutting-edge technology. We are providing variations of document favouring different parties instead of a one size fits all approach. Rather than confining our business to one country, we try to cater for all common law jurisdictions by having our documents drafted generally and a proprietary engine to select the right governing law and jurisdiction for the document.
We are also creating a sharing community by encouraging our members to share their documents by awarding them with free credits. Our legal team will review the documents and add them to our extensive library of documents (1500+). We also allow our members to request new document templates.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
There was a movie in my generation called “The Field of Dreams” and the motto was “Build it and they will come”. DocPro was initially built on this premises with the creation of more than 1,000+ commonly used document templates, but the traffic never came. The motto certainly does not work for the internet with billions of webpages competing for visitors.
I then consulted my next door neighbour at the co-working space, Raymond, who was running a successful online digital marketing agency, and he guided me through the SEO process. Since then, we have been trying to produce the best document templates possible focusing on less competitive keywords, and it is working like magic! Since the launch of our revamped site in April 2020, traffic has been doubling every month, and our COVID related documents have been doing spectacularly well. Raymond has since sold his digital marketing agency and is now my partner in DocPro.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
Initially I was going to use the domain “BlueSites”, until a friend of mine asked me why I am quitting my job to set up a porn site. I thought of the colour blue as conveying trust and reliability and was unaware of the connotation of “blue” also being referred to sexually explicit content in “blue movies”. So I had to quickly switch to another name.
I was struggling between DocPro.com, which was taken and costed thousands of dollars to buy, and a lesser name that costed just a few dollars to register. Then I remembered Jack Ma paid USD 10,000 for the Alibaba domain name (an astronomical sum at the time and more than half of his net worth back in the 90s), I figured that the marketing effect from an easy to remember domain name is well worth the money.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
As there has been so far no LegalTech player that has successfully revamped the legal industry, DocPro is different from the competition with the following features:
- Access to 1600+ Documents. We have one of the most comprehensive database for businesses and individuals online.
- Best Value. We are priced 90% lower than our competition without compromising on quality.
- Different Forms. We provide variations of document favouring different parties instead of a one size fits all approach.
- Jurisdiction Engine. We try to cater for all common law jurisdictions. Proprietary engine to select the right governing law and jurisdiction.
- Sharing Community. We are setting up a sharing community where members can share documents to be reviewed by our experienced lawyers.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I would review comments and feedbacks from customers every morning.
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” Bill Gates.
Feedback is of fundamental importance for DocPro to improve. We are now getting the traffic, so our next step is to work on improving user experience to increase conversion rate. That is why it is so important to get user’s feedbacks.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
“The 80 / 20 Principle” by Richard Koch. Most entrepreneurs like myself have limited resources so we should focus on the 20% that really counts. This Principle particularly holds true when you are doing SEO, try to focus on optimizing the 20% of the keywords and documents that are generating 80% of the traffic.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
Startup is hard, getting people to believe in your business model and raising money is even harder. Startup founder works much harder than an average employee, so need real grit and determination otherwise failure rate is close to 90%.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
You can spend a lot of money on Google and Facebook ads, but this would not be economical for DocPro as we are offering our documents at minimal price and the costs would almost certainly outweigh the benefits. So we have mainly based our efforts around SEOs, with the help of online media such as yourselves to get our brand out to people. We have also been listed on deal sites such as Appsumo and Product Launch. Like all other online businesses, we have been active on Social Media but it takes time to bring in the traffic from there. So far SEO is the most effective.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
With only $1000, I would start a blog and a Youtube channel on something that I really like. With limited capital, you can only succeed through your passion.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
“If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead is to ‘be different’.”
– Larry Ellison.
What is your favorite quote?
“If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous (literally, “a hundred”) battles without jeopardy.”
– Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
In addition to knowing what your own capabilities are, you will need to know the market and what the competition is doing. We try to focus on areas that are less competitive.
How can we get in touch with you?
- Kim Chan – Feel free to contact me at marketing@docpro.com
- DocPro – DocPro.com
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